According to the company, these two elements are essential to turn around the current less-than-bright situation.

Sony is hoping that, in addition to PlayStation Plus with three subscription categories, a more extensive PlayStation 5 stock will help reverse the downward trend in player engagement. In the company’s quarterly financial report, Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s executive deputy president and chief financial officer, said that compared to the April-June 2021 quarter, time spent playing games was down 15% from the previous quarter, but that June was 3% stronger than May (but that was still a 10% drop from last June).

Totoki said, “We believe the main reason for this is that the growth of the overall game market has recently decelerated as opportunities have increased for users to get out of home as COVID-19 infections have subsided in key markets.” Therefore, the company aims to attract more players with more PlayStation 5 launches and PlayStation Plus in the second half of 2022.

We’ve already written that PlayStation Plus is also somewhat stalled at the moment. Still, Sony is trying to promote its service, which does offer more than ever before, but at a higher price if you want it all (in addition to the three free games a month, we’re thinking of the free trials, the PS3 games that can be run from the cloud, the PlayStation 4/PlayStation 5 game library, and the somewhat underwhelming PS1, PS2 and PSP games).

Totoki is also confident that the significant game launches in the last quarter of 2022 (such as God of War: Ragnarok, coming to PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on November 9) will push Sony’s wagon. The company has not changed its expectations: it wants to reach 80 million PlayStation sales by April 2023. After the lockdowns seen in Shanghai, there are also positive developments in Sony’s supply chain, and as a result, more consoles are planned to hit stores over the holiday period.

But will the PlayStation 5 be more expensive…?!

Source: Gamesindustry